Particularly when it comes to posting full salary information for county workers, credit the 2019-20 Marin County Civil Grand Jury for dogged follow up of previous grand jury reports on local governments’ efforts to make the public’s business public.
The civil grand jury is a panel of court-appointed residents who take a hard look into local government, to ensure it is doing its job and producing public reports detailing the findings.
In its report, the grand jury homed in on the public online posting of complete and up-do-date salaries and benefits of local government employees — and found it lacking in about 90% of the agencies reviewed.
The county is not only Marin’s largest employer, but it has the technology and staffing to be able to make annual postings, and place them where it doesn’t take a master’s degree in bureaucratese computer skills to find them.
The grand jury found that 15 of the 34 agency websites it checked either failed to post a compensation report or a “conspicuous” link to the state’s public employee salaries website. “The worst example of this,” the grand jury reported, “was the county of Marin’s website, where four jurors were each unable to locate a compensation link after searching for at least 15 minutes.”
Access to the county’s payroll is certainly a lot better than it was more than a decade ago when the Marin Independent Journal had to fight for rolling back a county regulation forbidding public disclosure of workers’ specific pay information.
Supervisors finally agreed to provide that information to the public, but a lawsuit filed by one of the county’s workers unions blocked it until another court ruling forced public agencies to be forthcoming to report that information.
The grand jury’s recent assessment also follows a 2010 scandal in the Southern California city of Bell where its municipal leadership was being paid unusually generous salaries and four of the city’s five council members were collecting $100,000 for their part-time work — all largely unknown to the citizenry — until a Los Angeles Times investigation.The Bell scandal led to state legislation requiring local and state public agencies to post specific wage and benefit information every year on a state website and its own individual agency website.
From the grand jury’s audit, Marin’s local agencies have some work to do to become compliant with both standards.
The grand jury specifically credits the Marin Municipal Water District and the North Marin Water District as models of compliance.
Elected officials serving on agencies that aren’t performing as well, most often either due to failing to keep the data up to date or allowing links to that information to break and not repairing them, should make full compliance a top priority and a public-policy responsibility to their constituents.
That includes a breakdown of the varied components of compensation paid to local elected officials.
Maybe, they should take a moment and check their agency’s website to see if they can find that information. And, that it’s not outdated.
The taxpaying public has a right to know how their money is being spent. In Bell, its citizenry found out that what it didn’t know had hurt — or cost — them.
These two sentences from the grand jury’s report should guide elected officials: “Transparency helps to maintain trust in the government and gives information to the public that helps guide decisions on matters of self-governance. It makes responsive democracy work.”
They are ultimately responsible for that information being readily available to the public, particularly online. They are also responsible when it’s not.
May 11, 2020
Marin Independent Journal
By Marin IJ Editorial Board
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